As time has marched on, a sad truth has sunk into my brain: how much I eat makes a huge difference in weight loss or gain.

“Um, duh, Summer,” you might say.

More specifically, watching the portions of what I eat often makes or breaks my food intake success. I am carefully avoiding the word “diet.” Diet is a bad word.

I was in denial about this reality for several years beyond when my aging metabolism suggested I should face the facts. I skated by actively thinking I was “eating pretty healthy,” when in fact I was cutting a lot of corners. The scale wasn’t fooled by the deception that I told myself.

After enough time and creeping pounds had occurred, I was finally ready to admit something had to change. I hired a fitness coach to create an eating plan for me that would help shed pounds. At long last, I resigned myself to using a food tracker app to log every little thing I ate and drank – something I had actively resisted for years.

Logging my food and beverage intake was incredibly eye-opening. Horrifying might be an accurate descriptor. Doing so removed any wiggle room or pretense about my nutrition. Aiming to accurately log what I ate showed clearly just how easy it was to overeat.

As an example, here is a picture of a serving of mixed nuts:

Look at that tiny little thing! It’s so cute. And 170 calories with a whopping 15 grams of fat.

THAT IS A SERVING. Are you kidding me? (My hand is there for comparison sake.)

Let’s be honest, when I have a batch of homemade salsa, I’m barely getting warmed up once I’ve eaten that amount of chips.

I show you these potentially startling images to drive home the point that willful ignorance of portion size usually = vast overeating. No wonder the scale kept working harder, all while I thought I was “eating pretty healthy.”

The last year and a half has been a massive shift for me as I attempt to adjust to the reality of an approaching middle age metabolism. Now that I’m alert to how easy it is to overeat, the battle rages on, one bite at a time.

If you, dearest reader, share my challenges with weight gain and have not yet started measuring what you eat, this post is for you. Do with it what you will. I wish you all the best in fighting the good fight of healthy eating!